Despite all the talk today about the divisions between red and blue states, the Civil War remains the most divisive moment in our history. Yet in Edward L. Ayers’s splendid book we are introduced to remarkably common emotions felt by the people of blue and gray states.

After serving as president of the University of Richmond from 2007 to 2015, Ayers has returned with this study to the craft of historian and writer. He avoids traditional surveys, military histories and biographies of central political and military leaders, instead inviting readers into the private lives along a borderland, telling stories in real time through diaries, letters, photographs, military records and newspapers. We follow the ebb and flow of beliefs and emotions, hopes and fears, from the invasion of Confederate forces into Pennsylvania in 1863 through the tumult of Reconstruction.

Ayers employs both a wide angle and zoom lens, interspersing fascinating individual stories with insightful historical context, which he sets apart in italics. But he clearly prefers the zoom lens since it allows us to experience people’s thoughts and emotions as they changed week by week. Figures like Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, the men who are front and center in most Civil War narratives, are seldom mentioned by Ayers’s subjects.

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Many accounts of the war, both in print and film, depict the victory by the North as inevitable, because of its greater military manpower and industrial might. Ayers’s intimate, chronological approach allows him to challenge that thesis. Rather than inevitability, the people of Staunton, Va., and Chambersburg, Pa., demonstrate contingency.

Again and again, Ayers will bracket a poignant passage from a diary or letter with the phrase “at the time,” to set up contrasts with standard interpretations. Thus, “at the time” of the Union victory at Gettysburg, the individuals whose letters and diaries are quoted here did not understand the battle to be a decisive turning point in the war. Again, for residents of Augusta County, Philip Sheridan’s attacks in the Shenandoah Valley in 1864 did not “at the time” feel like the total destruction described by later accounts.

Slavery is a central thread that connects both of Ayers’s books. In this one, he portrays the courageous determination of African-Americans after emancipation trying to take control of their own destinies. Their hopes are contrasted with the condescending racist attitudes of whites, not simply in Virginia, but also in Pennsylvania. A new word, “miscegenation,” conjured up a new threat, the fear of the mixing of the races.

Women emerge as central actors in this volume, too. With men either away fighting, or fleeing in the face of invasions in both Virginia and Pennsylvania, wives, mothers and daughters stood up and spoke out against the occupying armies. Staunton experienced invasion in both June and September 1864; letters and diaries reveal women’s outrage directed not at the destruction of railroads and warehouses, but at the violation of the private spaces of their homes.

Amid increasing suffering in the last years of the war, Ayers says, religion was the “only solace.” Thirty-one-year-old John Dull, serving with Lee’s troops at Petersburg, wrote to his wife, Genny, that “perhaps we have bin too mutch attacthed” to the world and the war “is intended to show us how transitory it is.”

Ayers is not only a seasoned historian, with a lifetime of writing about the American South and the Civil War behind him, he is also a compelling writer. He orchestrates many different voices into a steady rhythm, with a tempo that is fast-paced. He is extraordinarily sensitive when it comes to letting the crescendo of a story speak for itself through a particularly telling sentence from a diary or letter. Thanks to his careful work, we have the opportunity to hear the people in Augusta and Franklin counties in their own words, as they demonstrate both courage and cowardice in the face of a war more horrible than they could ever have imagined.

Ronald C. White’s latest book is “American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant.” He is writing a biography of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.